‘In maps you can see how a place got to be the way it is and who was there before you,’ Mariam Ghani says.
Photograph: Hai Zhang/Queens Museum

In your own personal, mental geography, what does New York look like? A GPS grid of streets, shops and restaurants? A knot of colour-coded subway lines? Or perhaps Saul Steinberg’s famously myopic View of the World from 9th Avenue.

For the writer, activist and Guardian contributor Rebecca Solnit, America’s biggest conurbation is a “crazy diagonal slash of islands. If you put the whole city together, almost half of it is New Jersey, but that is usually blotted out in some way. It is just a really big, complex place”.

Solnit, well-known for her writing on politics, art and feminism, has turned her attention to New York City’s complexities in Nonstop Metropolis, the third of her trilogy of atlases and accompanying exhibitions, which began in 2010 with Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, and was followed in 2013 by Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas.

“Tennessee Williams said: ‘America has only three cities, New York, San Francisco and New Orleans. All the rest are just Cleveland,’” Solnit explains, before admitting there were other reasons she expanded this undertaking, which began as a commission from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, to include the Big Apple and the Big Easy.

“They’re cultural capitals, three port cities on the three coasts of the US,” she says. “New York has been hovering in the wings for a long time. When this book comes out in October, I will be done making atlases for the foreseeable future.”

In anticipation of the book’s publication, which Solnit oversaw with her co-director, the writer and geographer Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, New York’s Queens Museum is currently hosting an accompanying exhibition, Nonstop Metropolis: The Remix. For the rest of 2016, the museum will be staging talks and events, commissioning artworks inspired by the new atlas, and giving away free broadsides – single sheets reproducing the book’s works, which aren’t the kind of cartography you’re likely to find racked in a nearby Exxon station.

One new map, by Atlas contributors Garnette Cadogan and Jonathan Tarleton examined, what Solnit describes as “one of the great paradoxes of modern history”. “The South Bronx was being burnt down and destroyed as hip-hop was being born,” she says. “There was massive war-like destruction, but there’s this great cultural birth going on.”

Another, looking into New Jersey’s avant-garde heritage, from Dizzy Gillespie to pioneering land artist Robert Smithson, is accompanied by an interview with New Jersey-born writer, activist and actor Peter Coyote. “New Jersey has this great avant-garde history,” says Solnit. “yet it lives in the shadow of New York and doesn’t get much respect.”

The atlas celebrates polyglot New York in a map entitled Mother Tongues in Queens. “New York is the single most linguistically diverse place on earth with more than 800 languages spoken,” says Solnit, who worked with the Endangered Language Alliance when researching the languages. “That includes a lot of endangered, disappearing languages. A lot of those speakers live in Queens.”

The Queens museum show expands on this, with specially commissioned works from Duke Riley, a local artist fascinated with all things aquatic, whose mural, That’s What She Said, looks at the sources of New York’s drinking water; and Mariam Ghani, a New York artist of Afghani and Lebanese heritage, whose wall piece, The Garden of Forked Tongues, riffs on the Queens language map.

There’s also a much-anticipated map of the Wu Tang Clan’s Staten Island, as described by the group’s co-founder, Rza and illustrated by the Beijing-born artist Peach Tao.

“Staten Island is seen as this white, suburban place,” says Solnit. “Yet this group of black men went to a bunch of kung fu movies in the flophouse theatres on 42nd Street and Times Square, and came up with this mythology, of Staten Island as Shaolin: a mysterious, magical, Chinese place.”

Solnit’s project is in part a response to the kind of digital mapping services most of us use today. “People put restaurants in Google maps and little else,” she says. “They don’t think a place has a tragic and astonishing history. It just seems to be places just to eat food.”

She admits that, while online maps aren’t perfect, neither is her new atlas. “You can’t show everything,” Solnit says. “You can show butterfly migration paths and gay public history as we did on our map of San Francisco, Monarchs and Queens; you can show language use, or police brutality or landlord arson. Maps are always arbitrary.”

In many cases the choice of what to show where lay with the Atlas’s 30 or so contributors, whom include among their number the writers Luc Sante and Teju Cole, and the historian Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts. Yet Solnit’s reluctance to describe herself as the Atlas’s author – she occasionally titles herself atlas ringmaster – belies just a sliver of autobiography. Although raised in California, Solnit was born in the New York metropolitan area, and stayed with relatives in the five boroughs when New York City was a far less safe place than it is today.

“I was a punk rocker, and that kind of grew out of the ruins of modernism both culturally and geographically,” she says. “I remember when New York was a place literally beyond redemption. Now Manhattan is this super-swanky, elite place full of offshore tax-sheltered empty apartments and insanely expensive luxury goods. New York has been a lot of difference places. There’s the birth of hip-hop in the ruins of the Bronx, the fact that it’s the most Jewish place outside of Israel. There’s Wall Street and Occupy Wall St. If you love Occupy, you probably don’t like Wall St.”

In this way, the atlas ringmaster hopes her audience, be they Queens Museum visitors or book readers, native New Yorkers or out-of-towners, may gain some sense of time, in this exercise geographical place.

“In maps you can see how a place got to be the way it is and who was there before you,” she says. “Those are really important tools in order to be a well-informed citizen. Visitors may take that home to Bangkok or Edinburgh or Helsinki, and that may help them think about their cities.”